LONDON — Britain’s leading rock festival is going a little bit country.

Organizers said this week that Dolly Parton will play the Glastonbury Festival on June 29.

Festival programmer Emily Eavis told the BBC that “it’s been something we’ve been wanting to happen for a long time. And she finally said yes.”

Parton, whose hits include “9 to 5” and “Jolene,” also tweeted the news.

Held on the Eavis family farm in southwest England, Glastonbury is Britain’s most prestigious summer music festival. About 120,000 tickets for the June 25-29 event sold out before any acts were announced.

This year’s lineup is still largely a secret, although members of Arcade Fire have announced the band will perform.

CLICK THE PHOTO ABOVE for a gallery of Nashville-connected artists who performed in the 55th Grammy Awards in 2013. Here, Taylor Swift performs on stage during the show in Los Angeles. (Photo by John Shearer/Invision/AP)

Which means the city’s musicians have only three slots in the four all-genre categories: Taylor Swift for best album, and Kacey Musgraves and new resident Ed Sheeran for top new artist. And some of Music City’s commercial blockbusters (Luke Bryan, Florida Georgia Line) and critically hailed works (such as Jason Isbell’s “Southeastern” album in Americana and Caitlyn Rose’s “The Stand-In” in country and pop) received no nominations, just like our symphony and our other classical and jazz artists.

But if this is a down year, then things are looking up.

Tonight’s 56th annual Grammy Awards will offer plenty of showcases for Music City performers both contemporary and vintage. Swift will play a prominent role, performing onstage at Staples Center and competing in the races for best album, best country album, country song and country duo or group performance (with “Highway Don’t Care” conspirators Tim McGraw and Keith Urban). Her fellow country crossover superstar Urban will perform with guitarist Gary Clark Jr., and young guitar-slinger Hunter Hayes will perform his new, emotion-drenched single, “Invisible,” during the show.

She came to Middle Tennessee from Pennsylvania at 14, and in the ensuing near-decade she has become an international superstar, and a wealthy young woman. Those are rare and laudable things, but they’ve been done before.

Swift, though, is unprecedented. She came to popular attention with Top 10 country hit “Tim McGraw” when she was 16, becoming the first mid-teenage singer-songwriter to do so since Janis Ian hit the Top 20 with “Society’s Child” in 1967. And Swift has made the most graceful transition from teen stardom to adult music career since Brenda Lee, who recorded signature hit “I’m Sorry” at age 15 and maintained an impeccable image on her way to the country music and rock and roll halls of fame.

Yet these are not the reasons that The Tennessean recognizes Swift as the 2013 Tennessean of the Year.

Swift has become a worldwide ambassador for Tennessee’s capital city, an example to millions of young (and not-so-young) people of how to turn damaged feelings into healing creativity, and a financial booster to some of the city’s most important institutions. In October, the Taylor Swift Education Center opened at the greatly expanded Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum, courtesy of Swift’s $4 million gift, the largest individual artist gift in the museum’s history.

The center, which opened ahead of schedule in October, spans two floors and includes three classrooms, a learning lab and, coming in 2014, an interactive exhibit gallery. It gives the museum seven times more space for education.

And this month, on her birthday, Swift offered up $100,000 to the Nashville Symphony, an organization that endured severe financial uncertainty in 2013. For the second consecutive year, Swift topped DoSomething.org’s list of the top 20 charitable celebrities, and much of her generosity is intended for the betterment of Nashville.

“For her to believe in us, the hometown institutions, and to be focused on Nashville speaks volumes,” says Kyle Young, the director and chief executive officer of the Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum. “How often do you think she’s approached to do things, all over the world? So it means so much for her to believe in us and think that investments here would help the city she clearly cares so much about.”

The ambassador

In many ways, Swift carries Nashville and its music all over the world.

He's seldom discussed and even more rarely seen, but yes, Virginia, there is another man in Dolly Parton's life: Her husband of nearly 50 years, Carl Dean. And now the country legend is saying that in two years she wants to renew the vows they swapped when she was 20, on May 30, 1966.

"We've talked about that — we might do it all over again!" she reveals to Closer Weekly. "Another big wedding," but one celebrated not in Georgia like their first aisle walk but likely "at our big old plantation home (in Tennessee). We love it there."

Parton, 67, opens up a little about their highly unusual union. "He's happy staying home and I'm happy traveling," she tells the mag. "Once many, many years ago, he went with me to Hawaii, and he enjoyed that, but he never wanted to go anywhere else."

Country newcomer Kacey Musgraves and multiplatinum-selling country crossover Taylor Swift emerged as the top Nashville nominees when the Recording Academy announced nominations for its 56th annual Grammy Awards on Friday night, many of which were revealed during a live television concert on CBS. Jay Z tops overall nominations with nine.

Nashville’s Musgraves and Swift each had four nominations. They also tied for the top nominee for November’s CMA Awards.

LL Cool J hosted the show, which took place in Nashville in 2012 but this year returned to Los Angeles. Friday night’s show featured Swift and fellow Nashvillians Keith Urban and Ed Sheeran.

Using hologram technology, Dolly Parton plays the ghost of Christmas past in “Dollywood’s A Christmas Carol.” To see photos from Dollywood over the years, click the photo above.

With Dolly Parton’s busy schedule, it’s impossible for her to be on site for every presentation of Dollywood’s newest holiday show “Dollywood’s A Christmas Carol,” which is scheduled several times a day at her namesake theme park in Pigeon Forge, Tenn.

But thanks to technology, fans barely know she’s not there.

The show boasts the first time use of a high definition, three-dimensional holograms in a theme park stage show. So, fans see Parton sing and crack jokes every show as she plays the ghost of Christmas past. She’s just not actually in the room.

In addition, Parton wrote eight new songs for the 22-person musical and paid particular attention to the play’s setting in the United Kingdom.

The show was installed in Dollywood’s DP Celebrity Theater in October and following this weekend’s debut, “Dollywood’s A Christmas Carol” is now on stage several times daily during the theme park’s operational hours.

“Dollywood’s A Christmas Carol” is one of several plays that are a part of Dollywood’s Smoky Mountain Christmas, which runs now through Jan. 4.

Parton says her new album will be out in late fall or early winter and that she’ll start touring in January. She says her current itinerary includes concerts in the United States in January and May and she plans to visit Australia in February and Europe in June.

“I’ve been busy,” she says. “You know what, I guess if I had good sense I would get tired. I don’t even know what I’m doing. I just love to work, and it seems to all fall into place. I get it all done, and I love what I do. I brought this mess on myself. If I’m going to dream it, I’m going to have to do it.”

To read last week’s story about Parton’s expansion plans for Dollywood, which include the addition of a rollercoaster and a new resort, visit www.tennessean.com/business.